Cecilia Salber (email: csalber@kbcc.cuny.edu)
is an Assistant Professor in the Robert J. Kibbee Library,
Kingsborough Community College of The City University of New York.
Prior to joining Kingsborough in 1996, she was for many years an
Assistant Editor and Senior Reference Librarian at Newsweek.

Devotees
of Jane Austen’s fiction might understandably express little
interest in contemporary novels dealing with the urban singles scene
of the late twentieth century. A sensibility that revels in the
long ago world of country dancing, chaste heroines, and polite
courtships in delightful villages might well be put off by today’s
typically sexually promiscuous heroines. Yet in her two recent
bestsellers chronicling the adventures of a single modern
thirty-something Londoner, British author Helen Fielding appeals to
both sensibilities. In Bridget Jones’s Diary
and its sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason,
Fielding presents a thoroughly modern heroine who is surprisingly
reminiscent of, and at times as endearing as, Austen’s
Elizabeth Bennet and Anne Elliot. What’s more, Fielding
provides a glossy and humorous prism through which Austen’s
themes are refracted.

Fielding sees the connection between Austen’s youth-oriented culture and its
attendant problems of finding suitable mates and Bridget Jones’s
contemporary singles scene. An astute observer of today’s
mating rituals, Fielding is straightforward in connecting her novels
to Austen’s: “I shamelessly stole the plot from
Pride and Prejudice for the first book. I thought it had been very well
market-researched over a number of centuries and she probably
wouldn’t mind” (“News Review”).
As for the sequel, she says, “I borrowed quite a bit from
Persuasion for this book too, there’s a Benwick character and persuasion is one of
the themes; Anne Wentworth was persuaded out of a relationship by her
elders. Bridget is persuaded out of a relationship
by—ironically enough—too many self-help books about how
to improve your relations” (“News Review”).

Even without Fielding’s admission that she does not suffer from the anxiety
of influence, Austen fans would immediately recognize the parallels
between plot episodes and characterizations. In her first diary
entry, Bridget writes of her encounter with a Mr. Mark Darcy at Una
and Geoffrey Alconbury’s New Year’s Day Turkey Curry
Buffet: “It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called
Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party”
(Diary 9, 12). According to Bridget’s mother, Mr. Darcy is “‘one
of those top-notch barristers. Masses of money’”
(9). And though it is near the close of the twentieth century,
“in manner of” (to use one of Bridget’s favorite
phrases) Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice,
Mrs. Jones is desperately trying to get her daughter married.
Mr. Darcy, available, rich, successful, the son of old friends, is
her number one target. As part of her matchmaking strategy,
Mrs. Jones has been planning to have Bridget and Mark meet at this
very Turkey Curry Buffet, a contemporary analogue to the Meryton
assembly. Alas, by Bridget’s frank, humorous, and
accurate estimation, the result is a “day of horror”
(9). Her first impressions? “Mark Darcy. . . .
Yuk. . . . [C]learly odd” (11, 13).

Fielding’s deliberate weaving of the plots, characters, and themes of Pride
and Prejudice and Persuasion into
her own novels is hardly unique. The movie Clueless did
much the same with Austen’s Emma.
Art imitating art. But Fielding cleverly raises the ante,
working at a more self-consciously intertextual level: art
imitating art imitating art. For example, she portrays Bridget
and her friends Jude and Sharon as obsessed with the BBC’s 1995
production of Pride and Prejudice. Bridget writes:

Just nipped out for fags prior to getting changed ready for BBC Pride
and Prejudice.
Hard to believe there are so many cars out on the roads.
Shouldn’t they be at home getting ready? Love the nation
being so addicted. The basis of my own addiction, I know, is my
simple human need for Darcy to get off with Elizabeth. . . .
They are my chosen representatives in the field of shagging, or,
rather, courtship. (215)

And just after the broadcast, she writes,

Jude just called and we spent twenty minutes growling, “Fawaw, that Mr. Darcy.”
I love the way he talks, sort of as if he can’t be bothered.
Ding-dong! Then we had a long discussion about the comparative
merits of Mr. Darcy and Mark Darcy, both agreeing that Mr. Darcy was
more attractive because he was ruder but that being imaginary was a
disadvantage that could not be overlooked. (215)

The difficulty in separating the real, that is, the Austenian prototype, from the
imagined appears again when Bridget confronts the real life affair
between the Pride and Prejudice costars Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle:

I stumbled upon a photograph in the Standard of Darcy and Elizabeth, hideous, dressed
as modern-day luvvies, draped all over each other in a meadow:
she with blond Sloane hair, and linen trouser suit, he in striped
polo neck and leather jacket with a rather unconvincing moustache.
Apparently they are already sleeping together. That is
absolutely disgusting. Feel disoriented and worried, for surely
Mr. Darcy would never do anything so vain and frivolous as to be an
actor and yet Mr. Darcy is an actor. Hmmm. All v.
confusing. (216)

Several times in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason,
when reality is getting them down, Bridget, Jude, and Sharon pop the
Pride and Prejudice video into the VCR to drool over Mr. Darcy emerging from the lake at
Pemberley, dripping wet in a sexy white shirt (35, 90-91). The
fixation culminates with Bridget landing a freelance assignment (she
is a broadcast journalist) to interview none other than Mr. Firth.
To prepare, she watches the video of this diving scene fifteen times
(125). The resultant interview is hilarious since Bridget,
absurdly, cannot get beyond the sexy dripping white shirt (135-43).

Adding yet another self-referential layer to the intertextual complexity, Fielding and
company have hired Colin Firth to play the role of Mark Darcy in next
year’s film of Bridget Jones’s Diary (Mcdaid).
One can only wonder if the parodies and intertextual jokes will end
there. In a film of the sequel, will Mr. Firth be called upon to play
himself in the interview, as well as the Mark Darcy character?

While both of Fielding’s novels were bestsellers around the world, the
response has not all been favorable. Feminists have complained
that Bridget “isn’t a very impressive role model”
(“News Revies”).
One can easily see their point. Like Elizabeth Bennet, Bridget
has a lively mind, but some critics might characterize her as
“scatterbrained.” She and her fellow “Singleton”
(as opposed to “Smug Married”) girlfriends are consumed
with finding suitable men. Their careers and paychecks cannot
compensate for their loneliness and fear of “dying alone and
being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian” (Diary 18).
If in Pride and Prejudice
Charlotte and Elizabeth debate the judiciousness of a woman’s
showing or concealing her affection for a man (21-22), in Bridget
Jones’s Diary Bridget and her anxious girlfriends desperately scour magazines and
self-help books for the key to the male psyche. Periodically,
they convene emergency summit meetings to engage in heavy duty
“feminist ranting” about “commitment phobic”
men (Diary 17,107-09). These
decidedly unfeminist get-togethers invariably turn into junk food
orgies accompanied by prodigious amounts of wine.

Bridget’s frustrated friend Sharon says, “we women are only vulnerable
because we are a pioneer generation daring to refuse to compromise in
love and relying on our own economic power” (18). But two
hundred years before, Elizabeth Bennet was just as adamant in her
refusal to compromise, though she lacked the economic power. In
her famous remarks on Charlotte’s decision to marry Mr.
Collins, Elizabeth is emphatically pioneering: “‘the
woman who marries him, cannot have a proper way of thinking.
You shall not, for the sake of one individual, change the meaning of
principle and integrity, nor endeavor to persuade yourself or me,
that selfishness is prudence, and insensibility of danger, security
for happiness’” (PP 135-36).

Responding to the inevitable criticism that attaches itself to a work that interfaces
with a masterpiece of fiction, Fielding argues that she has written
“about all the secret anxieties that—apparently—lots
of women have but don’t like to admit to. It was very
interesting going to readings all over the world and talking to—say
very whizzy businesswomen in New York—who whispered over the
signing table that they related to Bridget” (“News Review”).
Fielding, like Austen, is an observer with a very satirical eye.

Would Austen relate to Bridget? Austen would probably be appalled by the immaturity,
lewdness, and general lack of self-control exhibited by Bridget and
her friends, but it is not far-fetched to imagine this kind of
character in one of Austen’s novels. Lydia Bennet, for
example, would fit right in with Bridget’s group of women who
are desperate to be married. And Austen would probably
appreciate Fielding’s astute characterizations, if not her language.

Shrewd, biting, and at times hilarious, the language of Bridget’s diaries conveys
the frankness and urgency that separates our time from Austen’s.
Bridget keeps a record of her vices—alcohol and tobacco
consumption, weight gained—and expresses herself in a peculiar
vernacular of abbreviations, missing articles and pronouns, and
slightly warped syntax. The effect gives Bridget—and her
words—a reality that a more carefully cadenced text would not.

In Bridget Jones’s Diary,
for example, Mark Darcy predictably finds himself in a position to
rectify a scandalous affair of the utmost embarrassment to Bridget.
“He started to pace around the room,” Bridget writes,
“firing questions like a top barrister. . . . [I]t
was pretty damn sexy, I can tell you” (238-39). Her
reaction is modern and visceral. In contrast, Elizabeth
Bennet’s reaction to precisely the same circumstance is
summarized demurely by a narrator who tells us that “never had
she so honestly felt that she could have loved him, as now, when all
love must be in vain” (PP 278).

In Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason,
Bridget and Mark gradually transform into Persuasion’s
Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth, lovers who find their relationship
strained by misunderstandings, miscommunication, and outside
interference. Here again, we find the contrast in the blunt,
inelegant first-person narration: “[I]f we love someone
it’s pretty hard to get them out of our system when they bugger
off,” Bridget remarks “ruefully” (Edge 233).
Bridget echoes Anne Elliot’s sentiments, though not exactly her
manner: ‘“We certainly do not forget you, so soon
as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our
merit. We cannot help ourselves ’” (P 232).

By maintaining Bridget’s voice throughout, the diary format allows readers to
judge the characters and their predicaments for themselves. The
omniscient narrator of Austen’s novels is replaced by an
unreliable, solipsistic voice that creates its own sense of reality
and coherence. As readers, we have the opportunity to accept or
dismiss Bridget’s subjective assessments and point of view, but
we also respond to the humor of the first-person narration of a
self-absorbed young singleton as she begins to get to know herself.

Few readers will see Fielding’s books as great literature. The “excursion”
to Thailand in the sequel is a bit over the top, for instance.
Yet, while the Bridget Jones books may not be read two hundred years
hence, they do provide us with recognizable portraits of Austen’s
women as modern singletons relating to “fin-de-millennium
males” (Edge 286).
They show the tenuous position of women who accept the fact that they
must be married to achieve social acceptance. As an observer of
contemporary mores, Fielding shows how the problems of a socially
mobile youth culture have not really changed in two hundred years.
Finding mates in a world where single women outnumber available men
is just as important for Bridget’s coterie as it was for
Elizabeth Bennet’s sisters, friends, and acquaintances.

The Bridget Jones novels are essentially
palimpsests upon which both Fielding’s texts and Austen’s
co-exist. Their ultimate value may lie in the insights they
provide into Austen’s work. By “modernizing”
Austen, Fielding not only honors her model, but also validates her
perceptions in a new century.